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In the opening scene of Scarface, we are shown a successful man; we know he is successful because he has just given a party of opulent proportions and because he is called Big Louie. Through some monstrous lack of caution, he permits himself to be al...

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The Divine Comedy is Neil Hannon, a 29-year-old Londonderry Irishman whose chutzpah in naming himself after an immortal literary masterpiece written by an Italian poet from the 14th century is nothing compared to his life's goal, which is to complete...

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That music is a language of logic is a fact too much emphasized by academics and too little recognized by the average music lover. No one but a pedant really cares whether a symphony drops to the subdominant key in the coda, but it does exert an infl...

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The decade is a dandy organizing devicea convenient construct. Generalize a little? Why sure. The most important thing to happen to pop in the '90s was a tenfold increase in the amount of music recorded. That's the factoid bandied about, anywayI've...

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''Twentieth century's over. No more Mr. Nice Guy.'' Marc Ribot's getting tough, but with whom? Not the New Year's Eve crowd for the triple bill at Tonic. With Cubanos Postizos, he's pure crowd pleaser. Hardly 30 seconds of a tune go by before he rips...

on January 4, 2000

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Gavin Smith: Pop music is used in films, at least at one level, to cue the audience to what era it is.
Martin Scorsese: Oh, no, no, forget that, no.
Film Comment interview, 1990
In any given year, 80 percent of my musical epiphanies take pl...

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Confession: When I started buying jungle records three years ago, every other purchase was marked with a "jump up" record associated with Aphrodite. The first time I ever attempted to mix, my buddy Brian pulled two singles from Aphrodite's own Urban ...

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From the Scorpions' early-'70s hippie-mush origins, through mid-'80s arena-metal stardom, to 1999's techno-rocking Eye II Eye, two things have remained constant. The hair may be gone now, but Rudi Schenker's guitar playing has never been less than so...

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More often than not, soundtracks are sonic non sequiturs; the music usually doesn't work out of context. Stripped of their Lower East Side seediness and teen melodrama, songs from Rent or Dawson's Creek border on empty histrionics. But The Simpsons' ...

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I'm trying to reconcile my position as a hip-hop womanist and mother (of a lyric-loving daughter, no less, who's been living up to her Malian name, Djali) with the unconditional love I've developed for that nigga Dr. Dre's (almost) perfectly sequence...

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If the decade in Modern Rock were a Shakespearean comedy (and what else could it be? Between hanging with Romeo + Juliet and Abercrombie & Fitch, and lending a name to superproducer Shek'spere and a script to 10 Things I Hate About You, he had a huge...

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Kathleen Hanna just gets better and better. And no, not because she's gettin' "older" or newly, appropriately, "mature," having worked through the catharsis of Bikini Kill and her subsequent first solo project. To describe her as a diamond in the dia...

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"I hate you so much right now! I hate you so much right now! UNGGGGHH!" No way can you deny "Caught Out There," the new debut single by Kelis (pronounced Ka-LEES), who was last heard sing-songing on "Got Your Money" by Ol' Dirty Bastard (pronounced K...

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The conceptualist avant-garde from the 1960s was the outer space of music, a music as far removed from inhabited regions of sonic thought as its creators could manage. It's hard to imagine that music as anybody's "roots," as though John Cage and his ...

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Notice that the annual box roundup in the Times was almost all mixed-to-pan? That's why I seek out archival music that won't wear out your ears or your wallet. There are two three-CD sets below, one a concession to the box urge, but the rest are sing...

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Baubling Over
Christmas fell early at Irving Plaza, with the fa-la-las and ba-da-bas (and do-we-dos) echoing 'round the hall. Cuddly Jim O'Rourke would make a fair Santa if he spoke up a bit: He's got a seemingly magical ability to be everywhere ...

on December 21, 1999

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The arbitrariness of annual top-10s always becomes clearer the week after, when you look at other lists and think, damn, how did I forget that album and why haven't I even heard this other one? Then again, maybe the most honest list you can come up w...

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Wetlands's basement lounge is the seventh-and-a-half floor of local clublandand not just because of the minimal headroom and occasional sense of shuffling among the zombies. Like the Village Vanguard, or even Yankee Stadium, the lounge is less a ven...